The use and presentation of multimedia content on a variety of mobile and fixed platforms have rapidly proliferated. By taking advantage of storage paradigms, such as cloud-based storage infrastructures, reduced form factor of media players, and high-speed wireless network capabilities, users can readily access and consume multimedia content regardless of the physical location of the users or the multimedia content. A multimedia content, such as an audiovisual content, often consists of a series of related images, which, when shown in succession, can impart an impression of motion, together with accompanying sounds, if any. Such a content can be accessed from various sources including local storage such as hard drives or optical disks, remote storage such as Internet sites or cable/satellite distribution servers, over-the-air broadcast channels, etc.
In some scenarios, such a multimedia content, or portions thereof, may contain only one type of content, including, but not limited to, a still image, a video sequence and an audio clip, while in other scenarios, the multimedia content, or portions thereof, may contain two or more types of content such as audiovisual content and a wide range of metadata. The metadata can, for example include one or more of the following: channel identification, program identification, content and content segment identification, content size, the date at which the content was produced or edited, the owner and producer identification of the content, timecode identification, copyright information, closed captions, and locations such as URLs where advertising content, software applications, interactive services content, and signaling that enables various services, and other relevant data that can be accessed. In general, metadata is the information about the content essence (e.g., audio and/or video content) and associated services (e.g., interactive services, targeted advertising insertion).
The metadata can enable content management, annotation, packaging, and search throughout content production and distribution value chain. Since the introduction of digital TVs, metadata has been introduced to enable digital interactive features and services. Various standardization efforts (such as MPEG-7, MPEG-21, TV-Anytime, DVB-SI, ATSC) strive to produce metadata standards with predefined data structures and transport methods for describing essence to support interoperability and unified services.
While such metadata may be useful in some applications, especially for enabling broadcast interactive services, they must be interleaved, prepended or appended to a multimedia content, which occupies additional bandwidth and, more importantly, can be lost when content is transformed into a different format (such as digital to analog conversion, transcoded into a different file format, etc.), processed (such as transcoding), and/or transmitted through a communication protocol/interface (such as HDMI, adaptive streaming).